


Landfall

by standalone



Series: Fucking Political Bullshit exR Coffeeshop AU [21]
Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: 2020 US Presidential Election, Election Day, Election Night, M/M, Uncertainty
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-04
Updated: 2020-11-04
Packaged: 2021-03-08 19:22:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,233
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27381883
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/standalone/pseuds/standalone
Summary: Election Day.Oh fuck.Please.
Relationships: Enjolras/Grantaire (Les Misérables)
Series: Fucking Political Bullshit exR Coffeeshop AU [21]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/610273
Comments: 44
Kudos: 51





	Landfall

> **Maxine Lamarque** @SenLamarque
> 
> For your ancestors, for your grandchildren, for your neighbors, for your world: VOTE.

*

Eons pass overnight.

Enjolras tries very hard to sleep, and is very unsuccessful. He spends some time on the balcony watching the moon, which is still pretty close to full. He tries to meditate, but that’s not a real thing, is it? He looks at the moon some more.

Around two in the morning, he finally breaks down and takes the “natural sleeping aid” Grantaire left on his nightstand, and by three he’s out. He wakes up groggy in the sunshine, squints at the clock, and leaps out of bed shouting.

“It’s noon! I slept till _noon_! On Election Day! I need—”

“You’re okay!” Grantaire bellows from the kitchen. A moment later, he shows up with a mug. “This is okay. Good, really. Have some coffee.”

Enjolras swigs it back. “What happened?”

“Absolutely nothing. I phone-banked for a couple hours. Everyone revealed their hot new election-day web pages, and they all say everyone’s at 0%. I asked Chida to text me if the senator needs you, and apparently she didn’t. Good for you to have something in the tank. It’s not like you’re going to sleep tonight.”

“How do you know? You haven’t been with me for a presidential election.”

Grantaire snorts.

“It’s nice to know that I don’t have to be the one losing his shit today—but I do think I should say, I plan to get fucking lit later on, especially if it’s tense, you know?”

“I guess I assumed?”

“Cool. Just, you can kick me out of the room if I’m mellowing your vibe too much.” Right then, his pocket lights up. “Oh, shit, Chida. Perfect timing. She says you’re on with the senator in ten.”

“I love you,” Enjolras says, and hustles to get ready.

*

“If we had a pet, it would distract me!” Enjolras says accusingly. He’s been making calls for hours; the senator asked her whole team to spend part of today phone-banking for downticket races. He far prefers text-banking to actually calling people’s phones. Most people don’t answer. He leaves peppy messages: _Did you know that Senator Lamarque and our mayor have both endorsed Kelvin Hernandez for State Assembly? Your vote could make the difference! If you haven’t voted yet, please vote for Hernandez!_

The mindless dialing, punctuated by the rare actual conversation—almost all with people who’ve already voted—is not enough to occupy his mind.

“Bring me a dog!” he calls.

Instead, Grantaire brings him a cold drink.

Lamarque calls. She’s hearing too much rumbling about Tuesday-night victories. “It’s great rhetoric, and I don’t begrudge them the fantasy, but we need to be explicit, Enjolras. This is not going to come down tonight.”

*

> **Maxine Lamarque** @SenLamarque
> 
> Even in normal election years, counting takes time. And this is not a normal election. 
> 
> How long can we wait for accurate results? As long as it takes.

*

“Is it going to go to the courts, do you think?” Grantaire asks when he sees Lamarque’s latest post.

“God, I hope not.”

“Maybe it’ll be so momentous a triumph that no one questions it,” he says.

Closing his eyes, Enjolras tries to imagine it. Trying to balloon outward around the possibility of a runaway win, his brain butts up against the bulwarks he’s erected over the past decades—the ones that keep him from hoping too hard because we all know where that leads.

Grantaire gets himself a beer and kicks out onto the couch next to Enjolras. “Tell me about your election nights. What do you remember?”

“Well, in 2008.” Enjolras shakes his head and signs out of the phone-banking site. He swayed literally no one’s vote tonight. He has done all he can do. He’s going to let go now. “I mean, 2008’s the one I remember best. I guess everyone probably.

“I was in a giant convention hall—the big one downtown, the party had rented it out—and it was so bursting with volunteers that we were all strung along the walls of the hallways, on the stairs, in the alcoves. There were people calling from right outside the bathrooms, next to the water fountains, never mind the flushes, they were calling—we were all calling—right up to the last minute: ‘Have you had a chance to vote? It’s not too late! Can I call someone to drive you to the polls?’” He stumbles over his memory for a moment here. Can it be real that there was a time when people would willingly climb into a car in which they’d share air with a stranger?

He doesn’t have to explain to Grantaire. “Another time.”

“Yeah. And when the networks started to call it—just minutes after we stopped calling, it felt like—the whole place erupted. Screaming. Crying. Kissing each other.”

R raises an eyebrow.

“Yes! Even me. I kissed Courf. I kissed ’Ferre. Then I was kissing absolute strangers, right next to the decorative urns at the southwest entrance to the grand ballroom. There were too many voices to track, but the screens kept flashing to the results, and everyone would start yelling again. God. It was glorious.”

It was bright then, and warm from all the bodies—so warm that the exit doors were all propped open which meant you could hear the exultation from the streets: car horns and fireworks and whooping.

“You ever spend an Election Night at home?”

He doesn’t have to think hard. “Never.”

“Well then, this one’s ours.”

There’s the group chat, of course, but it’s not the same as actually being there.

In 2010, Musichetta started to host watch parties in the Musain—and by 2016, he was years into working for Lamarque and watched packed in with her crew of political insiders as she locked down a swift, decisive reelection.

“2016 was so shitty, Grantaire.”

“I know.”

“No but—it was my first win.” He’s never voiced this. “We won. Lamarque just sailed through. My speech absolutely killed. The elation was so real. It felt amazing. And then—.”

It was like that drama exercise where a person’s burgeoning joy crumbles, and you see some awful realization melt into their face in real time—but on a national scale.

*

The Musain video chat is rollicking with everyone’s nervous energy; the constant background clacking of keyboards reminds Enjolras of the underwater chatter of aquatic life the few times he’s been snorkeling. He remembers the noise well—somehow, out of his depth, it set him at ease.

Nothing yet, nothing yet. A small cohort of friends are there in person, phone-banking from the Musain, but most are at their own homes.

The first results start to appear—tiny, disparate shards of information that could fit together so many different ways. Enjolras tries hard to remember that ultimately, they will fit together into one shape, that this whole damn exercise is like watching a vase shatter in reverse, except in painfully slow slow-motion, and that almost all the speculation will turn out at least partway wrong.

Jehan interrupts to remind everyone that they should plan to eat dinner at some point, and there’s a lively chat about who’s ordering what, and when. Inspired, Grantaire calls in an order from the deep-dish pizza place down the street.

They eat at the table, one of the laptops propped up next to them so they won’t miss out on any developments.

By then, local numbers are coming in and for Hernandez, they’re... they’re not bad. Probably. In a regular election year, it’d be easier to anticipate the trajectory of the results, but this, of course, is no kind of regular election year. Despite the stratospheric early voting and mail-in vote numbers, blocks-long Election Day polling lines dot the newsfeeds even now—those final voters of the election cycle, squeezing in at the very last second before the gates snap closed.

So, it’s hard to predict.

Enjolras texts him: You doing okay?

 **Hernandez:** Great. Fingernails are gone. Hair following fast.

 **Enjolras:** Ha.

 **Hernandez:** Grateful I can’t even pretend mine’s the most important race of the night.

 **Enjolras:** Good for perspective?

 **Hernandez:** You said it, man

Grantaire’s smiling at him in that funny way again, like Enjolras is a charming oddity. It’s ’cause he’s texting Kelvin, he realizes.

“You’ve changed too!” he says to Grantaire.

“Huh?”

“Since we’ve known each other. You remember when I met you? When I yelled at you at the coffeeshop. You wouldn’t let me do that now.”

Grantaire pshaws. “If you were a hot stranger? Suuure I wouldn’t.”

“But fine. I text a friend to check in. I’ve grown. But so have you!”

“Cmon, look at me. Of course I have. Fucking rich. Got a boyfriend, got a great job. Literally never have to clean up milk spills.”

“We could talk about that—”

“When your voice gets bigger, maybe you don’t need to say ‘fuck you’ quite so much.”

“Is that it?” He’s pretty sure Grantaire tells him to fuck off multiple times a week.

“It was easier to be shitty when it didn’t matter.”

“You weren’t shitty.”

Pushing the point, Grantaire stabs an abandoned piece of zucchini on Enjolras’s plate and eats it. “I seem to recall that you were Very Angry with me kind of a lot.”

“You wanted me to be!”

“I was less temperate in my consumption.” He kills off his beer. “And you were really hot, and smart, and kind of mean, and I really liked you, and—”

“I was an asshole.”

“I don’t think you’d ever liked any human as much as you like the general concept of _humanity_. When I met you, all you had was ideology.” Threading his fingers behind his head, R leans back. The chair legs lift off the floor. “And smarts. And a fucking amazing jacket. Dogmas in a trench coat. You didn’t know how to care like the stakes were human.”

“Is that—”

“Four years later, you feel it.”

It’s true. It used to be theoretical. He remembers the surety that brought, the brilliant clarity of his convictions. Grantaire’s right. “For all that it was a horrible, unthinkable reality, the horrors weren’t _my_ horrors, not mostly. Mostly, they’re still not. The worst parts, they still aren’t.”

“Right. But you—how to put this? You _care_ differently. Not the bright-light-of-truth caring, but the muddy humans-are-fucked-and-also-precious caring.”

“Well, that’s because of you.”

The two front chair legs thump back down so that Grantaire can tilt forward to make his point more expressively. “You used to want everyone to be mad like you. Now you know they’re mad like _them_ , and that realization—” This two-hands gesturing thing makes it apparent that Grantaire’s a little stoned; past the parallel walls of his hands, he’s got that spangly look in his eyes, and the words are pouring out with the measured intensity of a person trying to rush but held back by the limitations of a recalcitrant tongue. “—broke the rigid policy-wonk structure that held your rage together. You understand resilience better, but you also get that for all we say _it is wrong to hurt people_ , people are being fucking _hurt_ , and it’s happening in seconds and it’s happening for years straight, and almost all of it is people who aren’t you and who don’t need you to tell them that they’re being manipulated and deployed and sacrificed like pawns, because they absolutely know.”

“God, I was such an asshole.”

“You needed to be that. It was your way in.” He puts a hand out as Enjolras starts to rise to clear the table. “ _And_ it’s good you’re changing.”

*

> **Maxine Lamarque** @SenLamarque
> 
> To demand results tonight is to oppose democracy. The news networks do not choose our president. We do.
> 
> Give it time.

*

It doesn’t matter that he knows election-night returns are messy and incomplete; they still yank him around, a pathetic kite in a storm dipping and bobbing. Oh my god. Texas. Fuck, Georgia. Come through, Arizona! God damn it, Florida, fuck yourself forever, every god damn time we believe it could go different this time, and every god damn time... Jesus, but _Texas_. If Texas—if fucking _Texas_ goes blue, Enjolras is going to disintegrate.

Glancing over, Enjolras sees the telling motion of R’s hand, idly stroking his junk.

“Now?” he asks, incredulous as he mass-refreshes his tabs.

“A little.” That must be why Grantaire reoriented the laptop with the Musain call when they adjourned to the couch, so he’s out of camera.

Oh god. Does he need to bemoan Pennsylvania?

 **tagging out for a few** , he types in the Musain chat, and closes that laptop.

“Hey,” he says to Grantaire, and moves his left hand to join in.

“Oh, that’s nice,” Grantaire says. “Can I?”

The red and blue shapes on the screen in front of him represent so much possibility, so much anxiety and work and misinformation and suppression. They’re so many millions of humans trying to do better. Enjolras goes hard in Grantaire’s hand.

Grantaire murmurs, “I’ve always dreamed of jacking you off to an electoral map.” His hand, now inside Enjolras’s pants, wraps lightly around his cock and pulls upward. “Getting you off to—” he licks his upper lip “— _incomplete results_. Feeling you fuck my hand like the jagged lines of a bar graph—”

“Oh my god.” Enjolras fucks up into his hand. “Shut up. I am not fucking you about politics.”

“Aren’t you?”

Grantaire’s just lifting his hips a little, up and back, up and back, as Enjolras rolls his fingers up and down. He cups his fingertips around the head and pulls gently upward. “You like that?”

They stroke each other soft at first, then harder, firmer, Enjolras’s hand unsteady because he’s too close to pay attention to his rhythm. Fortunately, Grantaire seems to find his lack of self-control appealing.

“Fuck, you’re gorgeous,” Grantaire says into the skin just below his ear. “You’re losing it. You’re gonna break, any second now, you’re gonna let go—you can’t even stop shaking, you’re about to let go, and when you do, I’m—”

Enjolras arches up off the couch, his cock fucking into the slick tight grip of Grantaire’s hand, and it’s only when he feels teeth against his earlobe that he remembers to hold on. He gasps, feeling the pressure build inside him, feeling Grantaire’s hard teeth like the escape valve, an inflection point, a catalyst, a trigger. “Oh god, R.” His fumbling fingers grasp at Grantaire’s cock just in time for the leaking wetness he feels to tip him over the edge. “Oh fuck.”

“Yeah,” Grantaire says in his ear, stiffening against him, hips jerking. “Yeah, fuck yeah.”

Enjolras finds, after this, that he is in no hurry to move, not even to open his eyes. It’s quiet and still where he is, pleasantly devoid of the bright screens that he doesn’t even notice till he’s not looking, when suddenly their absence feels like a balm. He’s warm all through, and tender, soft, not the brittle he feels when he’s trying to figure out whether democracy will survive. Why does he ever do anything that isn’t fucking?

“I can still absolutely rail you later if you want.”

“Hmm?”

“Just destroy you. If that’s how you want to process.”

Head thrown back on the couch, eyes closed, Enjolras mulls this over. “Maybe it is.”

Grantaire kisses cozily at his neck. “I got you. How’s that election going?”

With a toe, Enrolras nudges the computer on the coffee table so that Grantaire can see.

“Hoooly fuck why, whywhywhy. It can’t be that. I hate to see that.”

Enjolras’s eyes fly open. “Babe?”

“What the fuck is happening here, Enjolras?”

“What’s happening? It’s—” He checks. All these stripes and percentages. “It’s just guesswork. So much is still up in the air.”

“I’m not okay with this.”

“Me either.” What did Lamarque say? He’s been thinking about it a lot. “We’ve known for a long time it won’t be easy or obvious. We knew it would probably be disgustingly close, and hard-fought, and slow. And now, well, I think it _is_. We were right, which sucks. It’s just, as hard as I tried, I didn’t want to believe it would go down like that. I want it to be a fucking inferno, babe. I want to see the hatred scorched from the air, so it falls as it would fly. And that’s not going to happen.”

He takes Grantaire in his arms.

“It doesn’t mean this won’t end. Maybe they end an inch at a time, kicking and flailing, dragging as many people into the coals as they can. And that’s worse. But it’s still an end.”

*****

> **Maxine Lamarque** @SenLamarque
> 
> “To be afraid is to behave as if the truth were not true.” —Bayard Rustin
> 
> It is a despicable act of cowardice to accuse voters of trying to steal this election—especially from a leader desperate to suppress millions of Americans’ voting rights. We know better.

*

Grantaire’s playing a goofy movie in the background and staying fairly calm in the cloud of weed and nighttime chill that surrounds him after his intermission on the balcony.

Lamarque calls. “The district returns are looking great for Kelvin Hernandez. I have remarks waiting, yes?”

“Yes, the ones we went over on Saturday. Anything you want me to add?”

She pulls up the document. “This is lovely. What an upstanding fellow.”

“I’m going to tell him you said that.”

“Please do.”

As the movie reaches some preposterous climax full of sirens and shirtless party-goers, both their phones chime in quick succession.

 **Hernandez:** Enjolras. Grantaire.

 **Grantaire:** Sup?

 **Hernandez:** I just got a call

 **Hernandez:** Of concession

 **Grantaire:** Oh my god are you fucking with us

 **Enjolras:** You’ve done it!

 **Enjolras:** Congratulations!

 **Enjolras:** Can’t wait to see your new office

 **Hernandez:** Cool. I owe you some lunches

 **Hernandez:** I can’t believe it

 **Hernandez:** Holy cow. Forgot I’m supposed to give a speech with the senator if I win. Didn’t think I’d win, I guess. Wowww

 **Enjolras:** Still got the speech?

 **Hernandez:** You know it

 **Hernandez:** Heading to Civic Center now—guess there’s a TV crew on their way

 **Enjolras:** Flabbergasted and impressed

 **Grantaire:** Could not be prouder, man

*

Enjolras adds another post to the queue:

> **Maxine Lamarque** @SenLamarque
> 
> I’m thrilled to congratulate @kelvin4state, who will represent my home district in the capital! Tune in: I’ll be joining him in Civic Center shortly for some shared remarks.

*****

“Take me to bed,” Enjolras says.

“You’re going to sleep?”

Enjolras laughs. It’s a bigger laugh than he expects—a laugh that ripples up through him and comes out raw and full and a little bit unhinged. “Not this night.” There is no good that will come of his staying up, but something in him knows he needs to; he needs to bear some kind of witness to this night, this change—because it’s a change, no matter what happens, it’s a change. He needs to see the sun rise on tomorrow, and to enter that new day laden with every fragment of data that might help build us a better world. “I thought maybe you could rail me, though."

"But the _remarks_! We need this win."

Nodding his head toward the bedroom, Enjolras agrees. Kelvin will be giddy with it, onstage with the senator, newly elected. He definitely needs to see this one good thing tonight. "Before the remarks.”

**Author's Note:**

> What even. 
> 
> A quick note: When E talks shit about states, that's specifically about their voting results, not about the populace in general. I'm sure you know this, but I want to be clear about it. I see those Southern splits and just feel miserable for all those voters working so diligently to tip their states blue.
> 
> My god, friends. Hold the fuck on. Stay strong.


End file.
